Today, the Crew will publicly honor the legacy of Kirk Urso with a memorial match against North
Carolina, the late midfielder’s alma mater.

On the sixth floor of the McConnell Heart Hospital at Riverside, however, the club has done so
more than two dozen times since preseason training started in mid-January. There, inside the
OhioHealth Advanced Heart and Vascular Center, the Crew has started going above and beyond what
Major League Soccer requires its clubs to screen for when it comes to heart conditions.

The Crew is the only MLS club requiring all of its players to undergo both electrocardiograms
(EKGs) and echocardiogram tests to check for hard-to-find heart conditions like the one that caused
Urso to collapse and die last August.

“We had some exchanges among the league about trying to get this done, and there was a strong
push at the end of the season last year to try and get it mandated for 2013, but it just didn’t
work out,” said Dave Lagow, the Crew’s head athletic trainer. “I approached the club and said, ‘
Listen, this is ultimately going to be coming down the pike. Let’s get out in front of it. Let’s be
a leader in this league. Let’s mandate it now,’ and thankfully they said, ‘Sure.’ ”

Current MLS protocol calls for all players to undergo an EKG test. If an abnormality is
detected, the player will then have an echocardiogram and follow up with a cardiologist.

Dr. Kanny Grewal, who reads the images produced by the tests, said technological advancements
have made the tests more affordable.

“First and foremost, we want athletes to pay attention to symptoms and take them seriously,” he
said. “However, in the absence of that, I think there’s a role for these screening programs to try
to single out the very few athletes who are at risk.”

An autopsy revealed that Urso died of arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, an
undetected, genetic heart defect he likely did not know he had. He collapsed at a Columbus
nightclub in the early hours of Aug. 5 and was pronounced dead at 1:51 a.m. at Grant Medical
Center.

Although neither of these tests likely would have caught Urso’s condition, they raise the chance
of catching heart defects to about 70 percent, Grewal said.

“That’s important for people to understand,” Lagow said. “Yes, we’re doing this because it’s a
better approach, but at the end of the day, this is not the end-all, be-all. We’re not saying this
is going to catch everything and ultimately this is going to be the miracle cure that’s going to
screen everybody and prevent horrible tragedies. This is a way for us to have a better screening
process, absolutely, and to make better decisions and have more data.”

The effort has not been lost on Urso’s family.

“Our lives will never be the same,” they said in a text message. “We support and applaud any
efforts so that what happened to Kirk never happens to another player and their family.”

Together, the two tests take less than a half-hour to complete. MLS is likely to adapt the
process leaguewide for the 2014 season.

“The big point is we’re trying to do what’s best for our athletes,” Lagow said. “It’s not a
perfect process. A perfect process doesn’t exist at this point, but there can be a better process,
and I think that’s what we’re moving toward.“Hopefully, by us doing this, this will help encourage
the league to get on board and make it a leaguewide policy.”

ajardy@dispatch.com

@AdamJardy

Kirk Urso Memorial Match

When: 1 p.m. today

Where: UNC-Greensboro soccer stadium, Greensboro, N.C.

About the match: Although the Crew will be less than 17 hours removed from playing
in the title game of the Disney Pro Soccer Classic in Kissimmee, Fla., coach Robert Warzycha is not
complaining about the quick turnaround.

“We would not add a game that was not important, but this (Urso) game is very important, and
it’s not only about winning,” he said.

The Crew will face North Carolina, Urso’s alma mater, with all proceeds going to the Kirk Urso
Memorial Fund to support congenital heart research. It marks the end of the Crew’s preseason
schedule, and Warzycha said he will use a different squad than the one that just faced Montreal in
Florida.